Comment on Discussion Thread ❌️🤖😥 Friday 1st August 2025
kudra@aus.social 1 week ago@melbaboutown @RustyRaven what I think will happen is : social media age verification will drive under 16s AS WELL AS anyone who values their privacy to less well known social media. But as what is already happening with the UK, large Mastodon instances are pre-emptively blocking UK instances, we in AU especially larger instances will get blocked from connecting internationally. Not sure how Lemmy is going to go, but I think the International blocks will come long before local action from our own government.
I forsee VPNs and gotosocial in my future.
melbaboutown@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Absolutely. My guess is everyone is going to flock to unmoderated platforms. This will be a nightmare as I don’t like being around kids :/
Even lesser known platforms aren’t safe and not even the fediverse because UK users are being made to provide id to use Bluesky. I think it’s coming for Reddit as well.
Age verification AI is now being rolled out for YouTube in the US as a test 🙄
I’m considering a VPN but the problem is it can get you banned or shadowbanned
Seagoon_@aussie.zone 1 week ago
ffs
this short sighted reg/law will have the opposite effect intended, it will drive kids to unsafe places and i don’t blame the kids, no one wants to be surveilled 24/7 , everyone needs privacy , privacy is a part of healthy boundary
this is just more of that helicopter parenting, the kind that says that kids shouldn’t play outside on their own
melbaboutown@aussie.zone 1 week ago
It sucks. I agree kids are accessing things they shouldn’t and there’s definitely a problem but this is not the way to handle it.
But then a lot of platforms and organisations are gonna love the excuse to have more control over the internet and access more of our data
kudra@aus.social 1 week ago
@melbaboutown to be honest, that time of the internet was pretty good. Though the best time for me personally was when #livejournal was on the rise: a paid account allowed you to add RSS feeds to your friend feed, so pretty much everything I wanted was in one place, but filterable and with very clear security.
RSS reader with Fedi support so locked posts are appropriately protected, with something like Gotosocial widely adopted would be pretty hard to stamp out with the current laws and even without VPN. Also most of the nerds I know personally are already leery of the risks of hosting a masto or Lemmy instance, so something that made this combo easy would probably go down well, even with those I know who so far are avoiding Fedi: they are happily using Discord but what happens when they need to show their ID there? 🤔
melbaboutown@aussie.zone 1 week ago
I largely missed out on that era due to not having internet for a lot of it but it seems better than the current environment.
I wish I had the skills for this. I don’t know how to code, host servers, or the first thing about network security. And there would still potentially be security vulnerabilities in the premade websites. And I’m not using Wordpress.
Discord is definitely going to be in the firing line.
kudra@aus.social 1 week ago
@melbaboutown yeah I expected Discord would be in the list as it's used by tons of kids.
It all sucks!
Hosting your own website isn't as hard as it looks, but Fedi is a step up and I haven't tried it myself yet, though it is on the list, along with #selfhosting. I predict a lot of learning in these areas by a LOT of people, as well as local private mesh wifi & #LoRa networks.